Dallas-based quintet Bad Stuff shouldn’t work– It’s the merging of two very disparate projects, each created with different personnel and concepts. More than one member of the band has not played professionally and several different genres collide within a single song. And yet the amalgamation of it all, built by a group of friends with the singular throughline of masterful guitarwork not only holds it all together, but makes for a unique excursion– not to mention a triumphant, singular and exciting new effort.

Bad Stuff is Dan Phillips (Guitar), Jackie Dunn Smith (Vocals, Synth), Nicole Estill (Vocals, Drums), Gabriel Spatz (Vocals, Maracas) and Laura Hartman Pearl (Bass). As discussed, the collective began as two bands but became a single entity through the virtuosic guitar of Phillips (True Widow) and the programming and lyrics of Dunn Smith. The seeds for Bad Stuff were planted when a friend asked Phillips to start a residency at a Dallas-based lounge, thereby creating an instrumental band with a true crime bent called Latent Print. Those songs, built for a two-piece, would showcase his considerable rockabilly chops with Nicole Estill (also True Widow) sliding into the drum throne for the first time. Latent Print created several bespoke compositions for the residency as the band was slated to play on a weekly basis, but the COVID lockdown permanently ended those gigs. Fast forward a bit to the lockdown days and Phillips’s partner Dunn Smith revealed her work as Concord Kill– synth and drum machine driven tracks built on a four track. Once Phillips added his guitar and worked with Dunn Smith to tweak the songs of both bands, Bad Stuff was born.

Clocking in at 43 minutes, the LP mines the shadowy corners of goth rock, slowcore, rockabilly, and synth-driven pop across its ten tracks. On paper, that array of influences may seem incongruent, but it’s all reminiscent of early The Jesus & Mary Chain with the nihilism of The Cramps, urgency of The Birthday Party, icy calculation of Suicide, and the melancholic beauty of Mojave Three. And their convergence makes for a singular sound when tied together with Phillips’ iconic riffs– entrenched in melodic tendencies with a heavy hand on clean tones dripping with space echo. In fact, the outwardly eclectic nature of the record is one of its greatest strengths where, much like classic LPs like Queens of the Stone Age’s Rated R or Songs for the Deaf, each song feels a bit different than the last, making the record play like a cohesive collection of varied songs as opposed to an exercise in any one genre. “So these songs from our two bands are sitting there, one set that I wrote for Latent Print and another set that Jackie wrote on a four track recorder, and one day we decided that maybe we’d try to put it all together and see if it worked,” recalls Dan Phillips. “And it did. And when I was doing the sequence for the record, that very thing of different approaches made that “switching the dial” approach feel apparent– there's not just one sound or one style. It really makes the pacing of the record work and helps showcase each of those songs.”